BBC Complaints site launches

Today the BBC stealth-launched the new Complaints site that had been promised in the aftermath of the Hutton Report. Officially the new process doesn't go live until tomorrow, but I'm pleased to say it took barely ten minutes from the development version being moved to the live location for the first new official complaint to roll in. If nothing else it proved the system worked end-to-end in the live environment.

I can't believe the amount of incredible hard work that has gone into both agreeing a process across the BBC, and into implementing that process editorially and technically. It still has some rough edges, and the user journey isn't *quite* uniform across bbc.co.uk, but those are minor niggles. I'm particularly impressed by the way that my team has managed to get the written responses from the BBC into a sensible browse structure, which means the audience should be able to locate the BBC response to complaints by media, issue, channel, genre and the obligatory "other". Although thinly populated for launch, it is my hope that over time this will build into a useful repository for the official BBC line on issues that we receive a lot of mail on - and will provide a definitive URL summing up the BBC position that hosts on the Points of View message board and elsewhere can point to.

Now we just have to see if it holds up to a furore as potent as the "Jerry Springer - The Opera" debate.